College Announces Upcoming Seminars

CHEMISTRY AND BIOCHEMISTRY SEMINARS

Monday, December 8th, 3:00 PM in W140 BNSN
JOSHUA L. PRICE will present "Development of Helix-Bundle Tertiary and Quaternary Structure in alpha/beta-Peptide Foldamers"

Abstract: Nature’s biopolymers use a relatively small alphabet of nucleobases and amino acid monomers to generate a bewildering diversity of structure and function. In proteins, information encoded in amino acid side chains directs the polypeptide backbone to fold into the secondary, tertiary and quaternary structures that are prerequisite to protein function. Inspired by the structural diversity of natural proteins, chemists have attempted to endow unnatural oligomers with similar folding and self-association behavior (with the ultimate goal of developing unnatural folded oligomers, or foldamers, that mimic protein function). To date, most efforts toward foldamer tertiary and quaternary structure have focused on the self-association of helical foldamers into homogeneous helix bundles reminiscent of the naturally occurring α-helical coiled coils. In this seminar, I describe the recent development of a heterogeneous foldamer quaternary structure in which α-peptide and α/β-peptide foldamer subunits interact with each other to form a stable cooperatively-folded helix bundle.

Thursday December 11th, 4:00 PM in W140 BNSN
JOHN BELL, BYU Dean of Undergraduate Education, will present "Biophysical Changes in the Cell Membrane During Apoptosis: Potential Pro-inflammatory Implications"

Abstract: During apoptosis, physical changes in the plasma membrane prepare the cell for clearance by phagocytes and hydrolysis by secretory phospholipase A2 (sPLA2). Relationships among these changes have not been adequately established, especially for hormone-stimulated apoptosis. This study addresses these issues for glucocorticoid-induced apoptosis in S49 lymphoma cells. Flow cytometry, microscopy and fluorescence spectroscopy assessed merocyanine 540 emission, laurdan generalized polarization, phosphatidylserine exposure, caspase activation, and membrane permeability to propidium iodide in the absence and presence of sPLA2. The earliest event observed was activation of cellular caspases. Results with membrane probes suggested that interlipid spacing also increases early during apoptosis and precedes transbilayer migration of phosphatidylserine, DNA fragmentation, and a general increase in lipid order associated with blebbing and dissolution of the cells. The activity of sPL!
A2 appeared linked more to lipid spacing than to loss of membrane asymmetry. The early nature of some of these events and their ability to promote activity of a pro-inflammatory enzyme suggests the possibility of an inflammatory response during T-lymphocyte apoptosis.

COMPUTER SCIENCE SEMINAR
Thursday, December 11th, 11:00 AM in 1170 TMCB
ADAM W. BARGTEIL, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Utah, will present "Physics Based Animation," while MARY HALL, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Utah, will present "Autotuning in the Multi-core Era."

ABSTRACTS:
Bargteil: Physical simulation has been an important part of computational science for fifty years. It has allowed engineers to determine whether a bridge would collapse or an airplane would fly, facilitating new designs, saving many dollars and potentially many lives. Over the last decade physical simulation has proved to be an important tool in computer animation, generating a wide variety of extremely realistic motion of complicated, high degree-of-freedom systems. The focus on visual detail and fidelity in computer animation presents challenges and opportunities uniques to the field. In this talk I will give an overview of my work in this area with an emphasis on the visual results (i.e. lots of cool videos).

Hall:We are entering an era where every computer, whether embedded, laptop, desktop, server or supercomputer, is a parallel computer. Technology trends and concerns about both design complexity and power have pushed computer architecture in this direction, but now there is an enormous burden on software developers to exploit this parallelism or risk slowing down yesterday's applications on tomorrow's hardware. This talk will describe autotuning, a new approach to software technology to ease the programming burden in the multi-core era. Autotuners experiment with a set of alternative application mapping strategies to select the mapping that best exploits architectural features such as deep memory hierarchies, specialized compute engines and multiple cores. Such programming tools increase programmer productivity by reducing the effort of porting to new architectures, and empowering the programmer to maintain code that is simpler, and architecture independent. Our research involves developing compiler-based autotuning technology, and applying it to application domains that include molecular dynamics, biomedical imaging, signal processing and social networks.

BIOS:
Adam W. Bargteil is an assistant professor at the University of Utah. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley and spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His primary research interests lie in the area of physically based simulation for computer animation. His research has focused on developing tools that allow animators to create high-quality realistic, visually detailed animations of complex materials. Adam has co-authored three SIGGRAPH papers and three animated shorts showcasing his projects have appeared in the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater. He received dual BS degrees in computer science and mathematics (magna cum laude) from the University of Maryland in 2000. Adam was a U.C. Microelectronics Fellow in 2000 and a Siebel Scholar in 2006. From 2005 to 2007, he was a consultant at PDI/DreamWorks, developing fluid simulation tools that were used in "Shrek the Third" and "Bee Movie."

Mary Hall (PhD 1991, Rice University) recently joined the School of Computing at University of Utah as an associate professor. Her research focuses on compiler technology for exploiting performance-enhancing features of a variety of computer architectures. Prior to joining University of Utah, Prof. Hall held positions at University of Southern California, Caltech, Stanford and Rice University. Prof. Hall is currently leading the autotuning group in the DOE SciDAC Performance Engineering Research Institute. Previously, she was principal investigator on DIVA (Data-IntensiVe Architecture), a system architecture project that utilizes processing logic internal to memory chips as smart memory coprocessors, and on DEFACTO (Design Environment for Adaptive Computing), an end-to-end design environment for FPGA-based computing environments.

NO GEOLOGICAL SCIENCES SEMINAR

NO MATHEMATICS SEMINAR

NO MATH EDUCATION SEMINAR

PHYSICS and ASTRONOMY SEMINAR
Wednesday, December 10th, 4:00 PM in C215 ESC
BONNIE BURATTI from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory will present "Seeking Season on Iceballs in the Outer Solar System."

Abstract: Models predict that the dwarf planet Pluto and the large Neptunian satellite Triton should both exhibit seasonal volatile transport on their surfaces. Using classical astronomical techniques, a JPL group, which includes many students, has been observing these two bodies over the past decade to observe changing patterns of bright frost on their surfaces. Triton seems to be very active, but so far Pluto has not exhibited the changes it should. One bonus of this work is the discovery of a remarkable opposition surge on Triton. This project shows how valuable the contributions of undergraduate students can be to cutting-edge research.

STATISTICS SEMINAR
Thursday, December 11th, 4:00 PM, in 3104 JKB
ERIC RINGGER, Department of Computer Science at Brigham Young University, will be presenting.